“She’s a great kid. Talented as hell,” Capricorn said.

“I’ve talked to Houndstooth, Avenguard, and Spotter. I think you’ll find we’re mostly on the same page,” Mayday said. “We don’t disagree, necessarily, but…”

Looksee nodded very quickly. I gave her shoulder a rub.

“Except I don’t know if I’m as nice as they are,” Mayday said, not finishing the thought he’d left to trail off. “I took over the department because that kid sank my predecessor. The question mark hovering over the bathroom thing was part of what cost me one golden opportunity to get up to the Protectorate core team, during the final year, when we were dealing with the new Endbringer situation. She ruined a lot of careers, teachers, heroes, social workers, and I can’t be fair to her because I’m pretty fucking bitter about it.”

“You could try,” I said.

“I could. I won’t. Advance Guard is walking away. Consider it a blessing, if you want. We don’t usually back off. But we’ll do it here,” he said, glancing at Looksee. “We’ll give you Cedar Point to look after, I’ll ask about what you said, look into the possible hack and validity of the emails. Spright—you get stuff in their office?”

“I went where Mapwright showed me,” Spright said. “But we didn’t get that far. These guys wanted me to go straight to you. We spent most of our time figuring it out.”

Mayday said, “That’s not your usual, Spright. You’re more of a scoundrel than that.”

“Pretty girl—pretty girls tell me to get moving, give me a convincing reason?” Spright asked. He offered an amused chuckle, looking at Sveta and me. “I might listen properly for once.”

“You’ve never listened to me,” Flapper said, archly.

“Or me,” Mapwright said.

ReSound didn’t say anything, but she cleared her throat.

Spright chuckled nervously.

Mayday raised a finger, while Spright’s head was turned toward Flapper. Beside Spright, Signal Fire reached out to seize his arm.

“What gives?”

Mayday walked up to him, seizing his other arm. With his free hand, Mayday patted Spright down.

He reached beneath a flat armor panel, and withdrew a notebook with a rubber band around it.

He tossed it to Capricorn.

“Amends,” Mayday said. His expression was solemn. “Good luck.”

They went on their way.

⊙

I paged through the notebook. It was a ledger, devoid of numbers. Transactions as barter, with a great deal of shorthand.

We knew what the truck was, now. With all of the preparations for war, a truckload of guns had made a disappearance. Prancer knew where it was.

He was a proper arms dealer, now. It wasn’t an insignificant number of guns.